Episode 173 – Edward Willett – Soulworm

Overview Soulworm, the debut novel of Edward Willett, now the award-winning author of more than twenty novels and twice that many nonfiction books, has just been made available once more in a new edition from Shadowpaw Press Reprise.A young adult fantasy novel, Soulworm was originally published by Royal Fireworks Press in 1997, and was shortlisted for the Best First Book award at that year’s Saskatchewan Book Awards. It was written in the 1980s while Willett was news editor of the Weyburn Review newspaper, and is set in Weyburn in 1984—which nowadays gives it a Stranger Things vibe, although at the time it was a present-day tale. Edward Willett is the award-winning author of more than sixty books of science fiction, fantasy, and non-fiction for readers of all ages, including the Worldshapers series and the Masks of Agyrima trilogy (as E.C. Blake) for DAW Books and the YA fantasy series The Shards of Excalibur, originally published by Coteau Books. His most recent novel is the humorous space opera The Tangled Stars (DAW Books).Willett won Canada’s top science fiction/fantasy award, the Aurora Award, for Best Long-Form Work in English in 2009 for Marseguro (DAW) and for Best Fan Related Work in 2019 for The Worldshapers podcast, and a Saskatchewan Book Award for Spirit Singer in 2002. He has been short-listed for Aurora and Saskatchewan Book Awards multiple times (most recently for his YA science fiction novel Star Song), and long-listed multiple times for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Website edwardwillett.com Book YouTube https://youtu.be/soin5a_PcvE Transcript Stephen: Today I want to welcome Edward back to the podcast. How are you doing, Edward? Edward: It's good to see you again. Stephen: Now that we're in winter, last time I talked to you, it was like negative 20 or something, and you were talking about walking around outside in the snow. Do you have a nice weather now? Edward: Is it actually over the weekend? It was more like 30, 31 Celsius. Put up around 90 Fahrenheit. So we've had some really helpful. Unfortunately, our air conditioning is broken. And so getting back fixed, but today it's quite cool. It's 18, I think for a high today. So Stephen: yeah. It's been awful humid here. We've had rain off and on for a couple of days, so it gets really humid and that's worse. I'd Edward: rather have heat. I went to university in Arkansas, so I know heat and humidity. And I was in marching band. Stephen: Oh, nice wool uniforms and stuff. Black ones at that. Oh, man, we had dark maroon and gold. You put that on and I played drums when you carry that big heavy equipment. Edward: Our drummers were lucky. They got to wear a kind of a peasant shirt with an open collar and something lighter. But all the rest of us were stuck in these winter weight woolen uniforms. Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. It's good to have you back again. We've talked with you before about some of the books you've had, the anthologies, short stories, some of your other books. So today we're going to talk about a new book for you Edward: called soul. Yes. Although it's not really a new book. It's a, it's an old book and a new edition. It's my debut novel now out in a new edition. Stephen: Oh, that's awesome. In that, and that's probably why you suggested we talk a little bit later for the author stuff about revisiting and revising. Perfect. All right. So give us a little bit of the background history here of Soul Worm, how it fits into your overall list of books Edward: And when I came out of university, I had decided in high school that I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew you couldn't make a living as one. So I was actually working as a newspaper. I went into journalism. I was working as a newspaper reporter and then editor of my hometown newspaper. I was editor at the age of 24 of my newspaper back at Weyburn,